Saturday, June 13, 2015

Surprise!

The
Malloy-Sharkey-Looney budget was hammered out behind closed doors by the three
gentlemen just before Governor Dannel Malloy was to begin a European trip,
ostensibly to convince businesses in Europe to transfer some of their operations to tax-plagued Connecticut.

Paris and Germany
were on the itinerary. Paris is lovely this time of year. Many moons ago, when François
Hollandewas installed as President, the famous French actor Gérard Depardieu turned in his passport and moved to a small
Belgian village about 24 miles from France, leaving behind as he went his
malison on M. Hollande, the first socialist President since François
Mitterrand left office in
1995. The richest man in the country,
Bernard Arnault, the CEO and chief shareholder of the luxury behemoth LVMH, had
earlier moved to Belgium to escape the confiscatory tax Mr. Hollande levied on France’s
One-Percenters.

M. Depardieu said,
“I am leaving because you consider that success, creation, talent, anything
different, must be punished.” Upon his leave-taking, French Prime Minister
Jean-Marc Ayrault, dumped on M. Depardieu, calling him “a pathetic loser.” When
M. Arnault kicked the dust of France from his feet, the left wing Libération
expressed its contempt for the rich in a headline on its front page: “Get lost,
you rich b------.”

The san culottes in Connecticut are less
raw. When General Electric (GE) intimated it might move some operations out of
Connecticut in response to a predatory budget, a handful of unionists assembled
to protest the effrontery. There were no banner headlines in Connecticut
newspapers inviting GE to get lost. Following the lead of both Democratic
leaders in Connecticut’s Democratic dominated General Assembly, as well as the
governor, protesting unionists declared that GE paid no state taxes anyway;
therefore its move from Connecticut could not have been related to successive
tax hikes initiated by Mr. Malloy. Mr. Malloy’s last two tax increases were the
highest and the second highest in state history. Some increasingly cynical
overtaxed residents suppose Mr. Malloy is aiming for a trifecta.

The notion that GE pays no taxesis a self-evident absurdity exploded years
ago by FactCheck. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, running for the U.S. Congress
against then Senator Scott Brown, deployed the notion winningly in her
campaign; it was rooted in the false claim that GE received a tax refund of $3.2
billion in 2010. And, in any case, GE is not the only large company in
Connecticut wriggling on the state’s tax hooks or indicating it may move
elsewhere.

The Malloy budget
submitted to the General Assembly was not, as his false campaign hype had it,
in balance and unburdened by new revenue increases. When the Malloy budget was
deposited at the doors of Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey and President Pro
Tem of the Senate Martin Looney, it was as expected refashioned along
progressive lines. In a backroom agreement involving Connecticut’s new
triumvirate, a budget emerged that maintained the character imposed on it by an
uber-progressive Democrat dominated General Assembly aligned with a
union-friendly governor. Republicans were not permitted to put their
fingerprints on the Malloy-Sharkey-Looney masterpiece, an oversight some
Connecticut newspapers belatedly say was regrettable.

In fact, Malloy’s
ambition is to destroy the Republican Party through a process of atrophication.
Limbs not used lose their force, and the same is true of political parties.
This is one of the reasons why Malloy did not involve Republicans in fashioning
any of his major budgets. In the one party state, magnanimity is unnecessary
and power sharing is both counterproductive and inefficient. However, there is
a dark side to undemocratic rule: The tyrant in whom all power has been
invested does not have the luxury of blaming consequent problems on his
neutered opponents. If Connecticut’s triumvirate, the governor and the two
principal shakers and movers in the General Assembly have fashioned a budget
that bears no Republican fingerprints, they then own all the consequences flowing from their budget. Just as
ideas have consequences, so do budgets.

Recent adjustments
made to the budget are slight – the triumvirate’s budget creates possibilities for
new and more taxes, and the most recent revisions only hit the pause button on
many destructive progressive measures -- and do not disturb the thrust of the
Malloy-Sharkey-Looney kabuki theatre piece. If there is a single reporter left
in Connecticut who falls for the latest political hype – that the final fatal
budget product is a material improvement of the preceding fatal budget products,
all concocted by the same progressive triumvirate -- that reporter should first
be awarded a prize for advanced credulity and then set to writing
sycophantic editorials.